Chaire!

Mitchell Miller, until 2013 the Dexter Ferry Professor in Philosophy at Vassar College, is now emeritus.  He works in the history of philosophy; in recent years he has concentrated on Plato and the presocratics, but he has long-term ongoing interests in late medieval philosophy, Descartes and Leibniz, and 19th and 20th century continental philosophy. He has published two books on Plato, Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul (Princeton 1986, Penn State ppk 1991) and The Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman (Martinus Nijhoff 1980, reissued with “Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato’s Statesman,” Parmenides Publishing 2004), a number of essays on Plato, and studies of Hesiod, Parmenides, and Hegel. He has recently been at work on the Philebus, the “so-called unwritten teachings” of Plato, and, as the Platonic provocation for this inquiry, the notion of “the longer way” (Republic 435c-d and 504b-e) to the dialectical study of the Good and a more “precise grasp” of the city, the soul, and the cosmos that, he argues, Plato projects as the yield of the “longer way”.